I personally don’t care much about federation and think it unnecessarily complicates the user experience. I’m here because lemmy as a product is good enough, not because I value its connection to other instances.
I do think we need to get away from centralized services, but I personally think the federated approach won’t scale well, at least the way it has been implemented due to the sheer amount of duplication of data.
I’m not going to avoid a product just because it isn’t federated, I’m going to avoid a product because it’s centralized.